A late bloomer from Brive-la-Gaillarde who only reached the WorldTour in 2025 after years on France's Continental circuit, Braz Afonso rode himself into Tour selection with a swashbuckling June: he took the polka-dot mountains jersey at the rebranded Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes while Martin-Guyonnet climbed the GC. Featherweight and fearless, he is exactly the kind of gravity-defying attacker the team wants littering the Pyrenean and Alpine breakaways at his debut Tour.
Palmarès
- Mountains classification winner, Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes (ex-Critérium du Dauphiné) (2026)
- 35th overall Vuelta a España (2025)
- 2nd overall and mountains winner, Tour de la Mirabelle (2023)
- 3rd overall and best young rider, Tour de la Guadeloupe (2021)
Cut-out factAt around 1.63 m and 50 kg he is one of the very smallest riders in the entire 2026 Tour peloton — a true pocket climber with a Portuguese family name.
The squad
Riding the 2026 Tour with Romain Grégoire, Clément Berthet, Ewen Costiou, Lorenzo Germani, Guillaume Martin, Quentin Pacher, Clément Russo — see the full Groupama-FDJ United team page.
Portrait: AI paper-collage render (gpt-image-2) after a reference photograph — source: equipecycliste-groupama-fdj.fr, author: see source, license: see source.
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